#fem! reader

The Director had clearly been busy during the post-war boom. Aang’s character had been through three different actresses, Katara’s counterpart was somehow even more prone to theatrical sobbing, and the actor playing Toph was still a hulking, muscular man. Your own portrayal had been "enhanced" as well; the playwright had leaned heavily into your firebending temper, making you out to be a terrifyingly bitchy aristocrat. Sokka, meanwhile, was the only one pleased—having successfully bribed his actor to incorporate a crumpled list of "certified Grade-A Sokka jokes" into the script.

You were comfortably tucked under Zuko’s arm, his thumb tracing idle circles on your shoulder, when his stage counterpart made his grand entrance. You felt the familiar tension rise in Zuko’s frame as the actor shouted about his honor.

"Even after all this time," you whispered, leaning close so your breath tickled his ear, "the fact that they still haven't switched your scar to the right side is actually impressive."

A chorus of snickers erupted from the rest of the group. Zuko let out a soft huff of indignation, his face flushing a deep crimson as he gave your shoulder a playful pinch in retaliation. You poked his cheek, grinning when he tried to maintain his "stoic Fire Lord" facade, before shifting to stand.

"I’ll be back," you announced, smoothing out the invisible crinkles of your skirt. "I need some fresh air before the 'Secret Tunnel' musical number starts."

"Don't get lost on the way back," Sokka chirped, his eyes glued to the stage as he shoveled a handful of fire flakes into his mouth. "The halls are confusing for people who aren't master navigators like me."

You reached over and gave his man-bun a sharp flick. Sokka let out a dramatic yelp of feigned agony, fumbling for a fire flake to hurl at your head. You dodged it with effortless grace, your soft laughter echoing through the box as you slipped through the heavy curtains.

Inside the box, silence lingered for exactly three minutes before Zuko awkwardly cleared his throat. He shifted in his seat, adjusting his high collar as if it had suddenly become too tight.

"I’ll also, uh... grab some fresh air," he muttered, rising with a stiff formality that fooled absolutely no one. "Just to make sure she didn't... actually get lost. This theater is a maze."

As the curtains swished shut behind him, Toph kicked her feet up on the railing, a wicked smirk crossing her face.

"He's lying," she said nonchalantly, feeling the frantic, heavy thrum of Zuko’s heartbeat through the floorboards. She let out a loud cackle when Sokka immediately choked on a fire flake.

The cool night air of Ember Island was a relieving contrast to the stuffy, velvet-draped balcony box, but you hadn’t walked far. You knew you didn’t have to wait long before the doors opened behind you.

You were leaning against a pillar, the moonlight catching the gold embroidery of your outfit. When Zuko appeared, looking flustered and scanning the shadows a slow smirk pulled at your lips.

"Found me already?" you purred. You hooked a finger into the high, gold-trimmed collar of your outfit, tugging it just enough to invite the breeze. "And here I thought you were worried about my sense of direction."

Zuko didn't waste time with excuses. He crossed the distance in a few hurried strides, his boots crunching on the gravel before he pinned you against the stone. "You knew I’d follow you," he rasped, his voice dropping into that low, gravelly register that always made your toes curl.

"Oh I counted on it," you whispered, reaching up to tangle your fingers in the dark hair at the nape of his neck and bringing him down to your height.

The kiss was far from polite affection of the palace; it was hungry and desperate, fueled by weeks of formal meetings and long distance. You were bold, nipping at his lower lip and pulling him closer until there was no space left between you, your breasts pressing up against his chest.

You shifted your weight, intentionally letting the deep slit of your skirt fall open. Your bare leg brushed against the heavy fabric of his trousers, a bold invitation that Zuko accepted without hesitation or the need of words. His hand slid down, his palm hot—perpetually simmering with the fire beneath his skin—as he found the exposed curve of your thigh.

His fingers flared, his grip firm as he squeezed the soft skin there, hitching your leg up slightly to bring your hips flush against his. A soft, breathless moan escaped your throat, swallowed by his mouth as he deepened the kiss, his tongue tracing the seam of your lips with a frantic sort of worship and desperation.

"The play..." Zuko managed to mutter against your jaw, his breath hitching as you nipped at his earlobe. "They'll... they'll notice we're gone too long."

"Let them," you breathed, your voice thick with heat. "I'm much more interested in the 'alone time' I promised you."

You guided his hand higher up your thigh, your heart wildly hammering against your ribs. Zuko groaned, a low sound of pure want, and was just about to bury his face in the crook of your neck when the doors creaked open with a violent thud.

"HOLY HOG MONKEYS!"

Sokka’s voice boomed through the garden like a lightning strike.

The two of you freeze. Zuko’s hand was still firmly cupping your thigh, your arms were draped over his shoulders, and your hair was a bird's nest of redirected passion. You peeked over his shoulder just in time to see four bodies enter the garden.

The Gaang stood there in various states of shock. Sokka froze mid-chew, a half-eaten moon peach in his hand, his eyes bulging, Katara had her hands over her face, though her fingers were suspiciously wide apart, Aang turned a shade of pink that rivaled a sunset, and Toph—despite her blindness—was grinning directly at your location.

"Oh, wow," Aang squeaked, spinning around instantly. "The stars! Look at how... sparkly the stars are tonight!"

"Told you they weren't looking for 'fresh air,'" Toph cackled, pointing a thumb back at the theater. "The vibrations out here were getting... intense."

"My eyes!" Sokka finally wailed, dropping his snack. "Zuko! She’s like a sister to me! I’m traumatized!"

Zuko didn't move for a long, agonizing second, his forehead dropping onto your shoulder with a heavy thud of pure defeat. Slowly, he retracted his hand from your leg, though he pointedly took his time to smooth your skirt back down before turning around. His face was a shade of crimson so dark it was almost purple.

"The play broke for intermission," Aang squeaked. "We just... thought we’d join you."

"Well," you said, your voice regaining its playful edge, "now that you're all here... does anyone want to tell me if the stage-version of me finally stopped complaining?"

"Actually," Katara managed, finally finding her voice as she steered the group away, "I think we’ll just go find some water. Lots of water. To uh wash our brains."

As the doors slammed shut, followed by the muffled sound of Sokka’s indignant yelling, you looked at Zuko. He looked at you.

"Sooo..." a mischievous glint in your eyes as you looped your arms back around his neck. "Where were we?"

Zuko let out a short, breathy laugh, shaking his head. "I am never taking them on vacation again."

You came to PTMC in January, which is, in retrospect, the worst possible time to move to Pittsburgh. The city in January is gray in a way that feels personal, a low flat gray that sits on everything and muffles sound and makes the days feel like they're happening inside a cotton ball. You grew up in North Carolina. You were not prepared.

What you were prepared for was the job, because the job is the one thing that has always been straightforward. You are good at this. You have always been good at this, from your first day on an ambulance at twenty-two to the charge nurse position you'd held at Durham Regional for four years before the particular series of events that led you to Pittsburgh. You don't think about those directly if you can help it. You've filed them under necessary change in the organizational system of your own history.

PTMC's night shift ER is a different animal from what you knew. Bigger, faster, with the specific energy of a teaching hospital, residents everywhere, the constant low-level hum of people learning under pressure. You'd worked in teaching hospitals before. You understood the rhythm.

What you didn't anticipate was the attending.

Your first shift, you're given the standard orientation rundown by the outgoing charge nurse, a woman named Delphine who has clearly been doing this long enough to have developed a personal shorthand for everything, delivered at speed. She covers the board system, the trauma bay protocol, the supply room situation, the attendings. When she gets to Jack Abbot, she pauses in a way that isn't quite a pause, more like a breath, like she's selecting the right words.

"Night shift lead," she says. "Ex-military, Army. Left leg prosthetic, below knee. He'll never mention it, don't mention it either unless he brings it up or it becomes a clinical concern. He runs a tight floor. He's fair. He doesn't raise his voice." She looks at you over the top of her reading glasses. "When he gets quiet is when you should pay attention."

"What does quiet mean?" you ask.

"You'll know," she says, which is not an answer, and turns out to be completely accurate.

You meet him properly at the start of that first shift, in the handoff briefing. He's already at the board when you come in, reviewing overnight census with the precision of someone who has been doing this long enough to read a board the way other people read a sentence. Whole, not word by word.

He's, you notice him the way you'd notice a weather system. Something that occupies space differently from the things around it.

Late forties, maybe early fifties. Dark hair with gray through it, more at the temples. The kind of face that would be called handsome in a way that's about structure rather than prettiness, strong jaw, lines around his eyes and mouth from years of squinting into the sun or the middle distance. He’s in black scrubs, wearing them with the unconscious uprightness of someone whose posture was trained into him young and never quite left.

When he turns to acknowledge the incoming shift, his eyes do the thing Delphine warned you about. A quick systematic read of the room, everyone clocked and filed in seconds. When they land on you, they pause one beat longer. New face. Catalogued.

"Charge nurse?" he says.

"Yes," you say. "First shift."

"Durham Regional before this?"

"Six years before that as a paramedic."

Something registers in his expression. Not warmth exactly, more like the slight adjustment of a person recalibrating an estimate. "Good," he says, and turns back to the board.

That's the whole introduction.

Later you'll understand that good from Jack Abbot in the first thirty seconds of meeting you is the equivalent of a lengthy written endorsement from anyone else.

The first month is learning. Not the job, you know the job, but the floor, the people, the particular language of this specific place.

You learn: Lena at the main desk has worked this floor for nineteen years and knows where everything is, has ever been, and probably will be. Consult her before the supply room. Resident Santos is sharp and combative and improves dramatically when you treat her like the intelligent adult she is rather than a medical student who needs managing. Resident Whitaker is careful and slow and will get there, he just needs more runway than the others. Dr. Parker Ellis is the senior resident who has, apparently, been trying to get Jack to take a vacation for three consecutive years.

You learn Jack in layers, the way you'd learn a complicated patient history. Not all at once, but accumulating, building toward a picture.

He takes his coffee black and too hot, and he has opinions about the ER coffee machine that he has apparently been voicing to facilities since before you arrived. He reviews charts standing up, always, unless it's the end of a long shift and he thinks no one is watching, at which point he will occasionally, briefly, sit. He has a particular way of delivering bad news to families. Not scripted, not the sterile clinical distance some doctors put on like protective gear, but present. Actually in the room with them. You've watched him do it three times in your first month and each time it's the same: he finds a chair, he sits at their level, he doesn't rush the silence.

He is, in ways that are professionally inconvenient, exactly the kind of person you find most difficult to be indifferent to.

You do your level best anyway.

The pain thing comes to a head on a Thursday in February.

The weather has been bad for a week. Pittsburgh winter, which turns out to be a different category of winter than North Carolina winter, with a wet cold that gets into everything and a wind off the rivers that has a personal quality to it, like it knows where you're going. You've been told by multiple people that you'll acclimate. You're skeptical.

The floor has been brutal. A multi-car pileup on 376 sent four traumas in under an hour, and the residual administrative chaos of that is still reverberating five hours later. You've been moving without stopping since the shift started, and you're aware, in the background-noise way you're aware of your own physical state during hard shifts, that your feet crossed the threshold from tired into genuinely unhappy about two hours ago.

You're at the medication cart at hour seven when you notice Jack at the far end of the hall, reviewing a chart. The weight distribution is wrong. He's putting almost nothing on his left side, and the line of his back is carrying a tension that wasn't there at the start of shift. He's been on his feet for the same seven hours, plus whatever time he was here before handoff, and the socket that connects his prosthetic to his residual limb has a tolerance for hours-of-use that you know from six years of working with amputee veterans is finite and individual and frequently ignored by the person most affected.

You finish with the medication cart. You think about it for another minute. Then you go to the supply room.

When you come back, you find him at the hub.

You set a heat pack on the counter next to him, the kind you crack and shake, runs for about forty minutes. You don't say anything. You go back to your charting.

A long pause.

"What's this for," he says. Not a question. The sentence has the quality of someone who knows exactly what it's for and is deciding how to handle it.

"Residual limb pain responds well to heat when it's cold-triggered," you say, eyes on your screen. "Particularly after extended weight-bearing. I've got four amputee veterans in my contacts from my paramedic years and two of them told me that independently."

Silence.

"Your weight's been on your right side for two hours," you say. "I noticed."

More silence. You type something. You can feel him looking at the side of your face.

"I didn't ask for—" he starts.

"You didn't," you agree. "I didn't offer it as a commentary on your ability to do your job. I offered it as a heat pack." You look at him then, briefly, level. "You don't have to use it."

You go back to the screen.

Another pause. Then, in your peripheral vision, he picks it up.

He doesn't say thank you. He goes back to his chart.

You don't expect him to. You weren't doing it for the thank you.

About twenty minutes later, a cup appears next to your keyboard. Coffee, from the good machine at the other end of the floor, not the hub machine. Hot.

You look at it.

You look toward the board, where he's standing.

He's talking to Ellis about a consult. He doesn't look over.

You drink the coffee.

This becomes, without either of you naming it, a language.

Not every night. Not predictably. But the small offerings accumulate, the coffee, the heat pack on the bad days, a granola bar left near your station during a brutal stretch when you haven't eaten since before shift, a specific piece of information relayed in a way that makes your job marginally easier, the quiet appearing at your shoulder on the nights that earn the particular designation of hard rather than just busy.

You do the same back. It comes naturally. Six years of paramedic work teaches you that care is often most useful when it's practical and doesn't require the other person to acknowledge receiving it.

The first conversation that isn't about the floor happens in the break room, five weeks in.

You're eating dinner at eleven PM, or what passes for dinner, which is the depressing collection of vending machine items that constitute nutrition during a long night shift, when he comes in for coffee. He does the microwave thing. He leans against the counter while it runs.

You eat your crackers.

"Durham," he says. "What made you leave?"

He's not looking at you, looking at the microwave, thirty-eight seconds remaining on the display.

"Needed a change," you say.

"From the job specifically?"

"From a version of myself I'd gotten stuck in."

The microwave beeps. He gets the cup. He turns around and leans against the counter facing you now, and the expression is attentive in the particular Jack Abbot way, not performing interest, just actually interested.

"What version," he says.

You consider how much of this you want to hand over to someone you've known for five weeks. Then you consider that you're in Pittsburgh in February eating crackers at eleven PM and your options for honest conversation are limited.

"The version that had gotten very good at the job," you say, "by removing herself from it. Technically excellent. Clinically appropriate. Completely sealed. You do the thing for long enough without adequate processing and it just," you tap the side of your head, "goes somewhere it shouldn't. Calcifies."

He's quiet.

"Paramedic work specifically does something to you," you say. "You're first in. By the time a patient reaches an ER, there's a team, there's protocol, there's structure. On a scene it's you and your partner and whatever you find when you get there. No buffer. You absorb a lot." You pause. "I absorbed a lot."

"And you stopped processing it."

"I stopped having the bandwidth. And then I stopped noticing I'd stopped. And then one day a woman in the waiting room asked me if I was okay and I realized I genuinely didn't know how to answer."

He makes a sound that isn't quite a word.

"You know that version of the problem," you say. It's not a question.

A beat. "I know a version of it," he says. "Different origin. Same architecture."

"Military."

"Yeah."

"When."

"Three deployments. Third one ended the career." He glances down at his leg without looking like he's glancing down at his leg, a micro-movement you'd miss if you weren't watching carefully. "By which point I'd been not-processing for about eight years."

"How'd you get out of it?"

He makes a quiet sound that has some irony in it. "Badly, at first. Then therapy. Then time. Then finding something worth being present for."

"Medicine."

"Among other things."

The break room is quiet. The vending machine hums. From outside the door, the distant sounds of the floor.

"Pittsburgh was supposed to be temporary," you say. "I was going to do a year, get my head right, figure out the next thing."

"And?"

You look at your crackers. "Still figuring."

"How long have you been here?"

"Seven weeks."

"Give it till April," he says. "The city looks different when the gray lifts."

"That sounds like the beginning of civic propaganda."

"It sounds like someone who came here for temporary reasons and then stayed," he says, and picks up his coffee and goes back to the floor, and you sit in the break room for another few minutes thinking about the specific weight of that sentence.

March is when the floor gets to know you.

Lena starts leaving notes for you at the start of shift, small intelligence briefings on the state of the floor, the status of the supply situation, which residents are having good nights and which need watching. Santos, after an incident involving a difficult patient and your intervention on her behalf, starts bringing you coffee exactly once a week in what you understand is her version of a significant gesture. Whitaker asks you questions in the tentative way of someone who has been burned before by asking the wrong person, and you answer them straight, and he relaxes.

Parker Ellis tells you, on a Tuesday in March, that you're good for the floor.

"How so," you say.

"You stabilize things," she says. "Some charge nurses manage the floor. You hold it. There's a difference."

You think about this later. You think about the version of yourself in Durham who was excellent at managing and terrible at holding, and whether Pittsburgh is teaching you something or whether you arrived already changed and the city is just the location of the change.

You think about a lot of things lately that you'd stopped thinking about for a couple of years.

Jack is not incidental to this. You'd be dishonest with yourself if you tried to argue that he was. There's something about the quality of his attention, the specific way he notices without making the noticing a performance, that has begun to unlock things. Things you sealed up and labeled later and then ignored.

You don't know what to do about this, exactly.

You file it under pending.

The night it shifts is a Wednesday in late March.

A warehouse fire on the South Side sends three critical patients in under forty minutes. It's the kind of night that strips everything down to function, no room for anything except the work, the sequence, the next right thing. You've been in these nights before. You know how to move through them.

What you haven't navigated before is moving through one of these nights and simultaneously being aware, in some registered but unaddressed corner of your attention, that Jack Abbot is running on something that isn't all right.

It starts small. The tells are minor. He's been on his feet longer than he should, the cold has been bad this week, the socket issue you've been watching for two months has been a recurring problem and he's mentioned the new fitting exactly once in the dismissive tone of someone who made an appointment and then cancelled it. On a normal night you'd leave a heat pack and a coffee and consider the conversation managed.

This isn't a normal night. This is eight hours of controlled emergency, and by hour six you can see, if you're watching, if you've been watching for three months, that the pain is running high enough to be a factor.

He doesn't show it in the work. That's the thing that makes it worse, in a way. The work is impeccable. The decisions are right, the communication is clear, the patients are managed with the same steady competence that they always are. Whatever he's dealing with, he has put it somewhere else with a proficiency that speaks to long practice.

But you've been a paramedic. You've seen people push through pain until their body stops accepting the instruction, and you know what that looks like in the seconds before it happens.

At hour seven, during a lull between the second and third trauma, you find him at the hub. You don't ask how he's doing. That's not the language.

"I need you to do something for me," you say.

He looks at you.

"Sit down for twenty minutes. I'll cover."

"I don't need—"

"I know you don't need to. I'm asking you to do it for the floor." You hold his gaze. "You're eight hours into a shift that's had three traumas and you've been compensating your gait for the last two hours, which means the socket is causing problems, and if you end up off your feet involuntarily in hour nine because you didn't sit down in hour seven, that's a floor problem. So I'm asking you, as charge nurse, to sit down."

A long pause.

"That was very tactical," he says.

"I spent six years on ambulances. I learned to frame requests so people would take them."

Something almost moves in his expression. "Twenty minutes."

"Twenty minutes."

He goes to the break room. You cover the floor. Twenty-three minutes later he's back, and the gait is better, and the tension in his jaw has reduced to something closer to baseline, and he doesn't say anything about it and neither do you.

But at the end of shift, when the floor is winding down and you're both at the hub finishing charting, he says, without looking up from his screen: "How did you know it was the socket and not the phantom pain."

"Phantom pain doesn't change your gait," you say. "Socket fit does."

He's quiet.

"You cancelled the fitting appointment," you say. Not a question.

"How do you—"

"You mentioned it in February. You haven't mentioned it since, and the problem's gotten worse, not better." You save your chart. "I'm not asking you to explain yourself. I'm observing that the appointment would probably help."

A pause. Then: "You're very annoying."

"I know."

"In a," he stops. Starts differently. "It's useful. The annoying."

"High praise."

The almost-sound, the one that isn't quite a laugh. You've been hearing it for three months and you've started to understand that it's the version of warmth he allows himself in professional settings, the suggestion of it, the controlled release. You've started to notice when you prompt it.

You're aware this is information with implications you haven't fully processed.

April arrives and the gray does lift, like he said.

It happens incrementally, a morning here, an afternoon there, the river catching light in a way that Pittsburgh in January made you doubt was possible. The city reveals itself differently in April. Older neighborhoods with the particular architecture of a place built by people who intended to stay. Bridges everywhere, connecting things.

You take a different route to work and find a diner and start stopping there before night shifts, and the routine of it, the specific booth, the same server who brings coffee without being asked after the third visit, grounds something that has been unmoored since January.

You're better, you realize, in April.

Not fixed. Not resolved. But better, in the specific sense of being present in your life rather than passing through it at a remove.

You tell Jack this, one night in the break room, because the break room has become the place where you say the things that don't fit on the floor.

"You were right about April," you say.

He's at the table with a chart, paper, one of the few remaining paper charts, a particular older patient who prefers them and for whom Jack has apparently been maintaining the practice without comment for two years. "Was I."

"The city looks different. You were right."

"Mmm." He makes a note. "How's the diner?"

You look at him. "I haven't mentioned a diner."

"You come in before some shifts with powdered sugar on your jacket," he says. "There's a diner on Penn Avenue that does beignets until four AM. It's the only place within walking distance of the parking structure."

You look at your jacket. There is, in fact, a trace of powdered sugar on the lapel.

"That's —" you start.

"Observational" he says. "Same thing you do."

You sit down across from him. He turns a page in the chart. The break room is quiet.

"How long did it take you?" you ask. "After you moved here. To feel like Pittsburgh was where you actually lived and not just where you were."

He thinks about it. "Two years, maybe. Closer to three before it felt like home."

"What made it feel like home eventually?"

He's quiet for a moment. Then: "People. The floor. Having something that mattered."

"Not the city itself."

"The city's just the container" he says. "What you put in it is the part that matters."

You look at the table. "I haven't put very much in it yet."

"You've been here four months."

"I know. In Durham I had ten years of putting things in. People, places, a version of myself that knew how to be there. Starting over is —" you look for the word.

"Expensive" he says.

You look at him.

"It costs something," he says. "Starting over. People underestimate that. They think fresh start means free, but it's actually the opposite. You pay for the fresh start with everything you built before it."

"Was yours worth it?" you ask. "The cost."

A long pause. He closes the chart. He looks at you with the expression that isn't quite neutral, the one you've seen a handful of times, the careful one, the one that's managing something.

"Most days," he says. "Yes."

The night in April that you file under the night things changed is less dramatic than you'd expect.

It's not a bad shift, particularly. Moderately busy. No catastrophes. The kind of night where you move steadily and finish on time and feel, at the end of it, tired in the clean way rather than the hollowed-out way.

What happens is this: at two in the morning, during a quiet stretch, you're in the hallway outside the storage room and your phone rings with a call you've been half-expecting and fully dreading.

It's your sister in Raleigh. Your mother's been asking about you. It's been three months since you visited. When are you coming home.

You stand in the hallway and have a version of the conversation you've been having for a year, the one where you explain, without explaining, that home is a complicated word right now and that you're figuring things out and that yes, you'll visit, you just need a little more time. Your sister is kind about it. She's always kind about it. The kindness makes it worse, somehow.

You hang up and stand in the hallway for a moment with your hand flat against the wall.

"Bad news?"

You turn. Jack is at the other end of the hall, heading toward you.

"No," you say. "Just family. It's fine."

He slows as he reaches you, reading the hallway the way he reads everything. He doesn't keep walking. He stops, a few feet away.

"You don't have to," he starts.

"I know." You lower your hand from the wall. "My mom wants me to come home for a visit. My sister was relaying the message. Nothing bad happened. I just—"

you stop. You're not sure how to finish the sentence.

"Don't know what home means right now," he says.

You look at him.

"You said in March, starting over costs what you had before. I think one of the things it costs is the easy answer to that question."

Your chest does something complicated. "Yeah."

"That gets easier," he says. "Not because you answer it definitively. Just because you get better at living in the ambiguity."

"That sounds terrible."

"It's better than it sounds."

You lean back against the wall. He stays where he is, which means he's about three feet from you, and the hallway is empty and quiet and it's two in the morning in Pittsburgh and you've known this man for four months.

"Jack," you say.

"Yeah."

"Can I ask you something personal?"

A pause. "Probably."

"After you came back from the last deployment, the one where you lost the leg, who took care of you?"

The question sits in the hallway. He's very still.

"Why are you asking that," he says. Carefully. Not defensively.

"Because you're very good at it," you say. "Taking care of people. Not in the managing way. In the actual way. And I've been trying to work out if that's just who you are, or if someone taught you by doing it for you."

A long pause.

"My platoon medic," he says. "Before I became one myself. Man named Curtis. He had a way of treating the person that had nothing to do with treating the injury. Used to drive the MOs insane. He'd spend ten minutes just talking to someone. Being there. And they'd come through things they statistically shouldn't have come through." He pauses. "I asked him once why he did it that way. He said the body takes cues from being witnessed. That knowing someone is there changes the physiology."

"He was right," you say. "That's documented."

"I know that now." He looks at the floor for a second, then back up. "After I came home the last time, after the leg, no one took care of me, specifically. I didn't allow it. I had a version of that problem you described. Sealed up. Handled." He says handled with the specific irony of someone who has been in enough therapy to know what they were actually doing. "I took care of myself because the alternative meant admitting I needed it."

"How'd you crack that open?"

"A therapist with considerably more patience than I deserved," he says. "And time. And losing enough by refusing to let anyone in that eventually the cost of refusing was higher than the cost of letting."

"What did you lose?"

He's quiet for a moment. "That's the longer story."

"Okay," you say. You don't push.

He looks at you. The careful expression, the managed one, and then, for just a second, something shifts in it. Like a held breath, released.

"My wife died," he says. "Seven years ago. And I'd been so shut down, for so long, that I almost missed the last year of her life because I was performing fine for everyone including her. Including myself." A pause. "I don't, I'm not putting that on the table as a bid for sympathy. I'm answering your question about who taught me by doing it for me. She did. Once I finally let her."

The hallway is very quiet.

"I'm sorry," you say.

"Thank you." Said simply. Not deflecting it, not managing it. Just receiving it.

You stand in the hallway for another moment.

"That's not a shorter story." you say, finally.

The almost-sound. The not-quite-laugh. Warmer than usual. "No." he says. "It's not."

"Thank you for telling me."

"You asked an honest question," he says. "You get an honest answer."

He pushes off from where he's been standing and moves back toward the floor. At the hallway junction, he pauses.

"You should go visit," he says. "Your mom. It doesn't have to mean anything about home. It can just mean going."

You look at him.

"Pittsburgh will still be here when you get back," he says, and turns the corner.

You stand in the hallway for another thirty seconds.

Then you go back to the floor and do your job and don't think about it. Or try not to.

You fail, mostly.

May.

You go to Raleigh for four days, which is the longest you've been away from the floor since January, and which reveals something you hadn't fully understood: you miss Pittsburgh when you're not there.

Not the winter. Not the gray. But the diner and the particular quality of the morning light over the river and the floor and the people on it. Lena and her comprehensive institutional knowledge. Santos and her weekly coffee tribute. Whitaker finding his footing. Parker Ellis's running commentary on everything.

And Jack. You miss Jack, which you acknowledge privately and then immediately file under to be examined later while you eat your mother's cooking and sit on your sister's porch and allow yourself, for four days, to be someone's child and someone's sister and not a charge nurse running a trauma floor.

When you come back, you are, measurably, better. Something that was wound has loosened. Something that was held at distance has been permitted to be close.

You walk into your first shift back and Lena says "welcome back, honey" and Santos gives you a nod that is the Santos equivalent of a standing ovation, and Whitaker tells you about a case he managed well while you were gone with the barely-suppressed pride of a kid showing a parent a test score.

Jack is at the board when you come in. He doesn't turn immediately. You do the handoff briefing, get caught up on the floor status, settle into the shift.

An hour in, he ends up beside you at the hub.

"How was Raleigh," he says. Not looking at you. Looking at the board.

"Good," you say. "It was good."

"Your mom."

"Good. She kept feeding me."

"Sounds right."

"How was the floor," you say.

"Functional. Ellis covered competently. Whitaker had a good week."

"I heard."

A pause. He marks something on the board.

"You look better," he says. Still looking at the board.

"I feel better."

"Good." He caps the marker. And then, still not looking at you: "Pittsburgh felt different with you gone."

You go very still.

He puts the marker in the tray. He still doesn't look at you. The floor noise continues around you, the steady background hum of a functioning ER, monitors, voices, the distant sound of the ambulance bay.

"I'm not sure what to do with that," you say, very carefully.

"You don't have to do anything with it," he says. "I'm just saying it. For accuracy."

You look at the side of his face. The line of his jaw. The gray at his temple.

"Jack," you say.

He turns, finally, and looks at you.

"I need you to be clearer than that," you say. "Because I have been working very hard for five months to be professional about something and if you are saying what I think you might be saying I need you to actually say it."

A pause. Something in his expression moves through several registers, the careful controlled neutral, the managed version, and then the version underneath it, the one you've seen a handful of times. The unguarded one.

"I think about you," he says. "Outside of work. I think about whether you're sleeping enough, whether the diner is open when you need it to be, whether whatever you're still carrying from Durham is getting lighter." He looks at you steadily. "I'm aware of the position. I'm not asking you for anything. I just, you said you needed me to be clear."

You breathe.

"I think about you outside of work too," you say.

The hallway with your sister calling. The four days in Raleigh and the shape of what was missing. The floor at two AM and the particular way he told you the longer story because you asked an honest question.

"I think about how you are the first person in a long time who has not asked me to perform anything," you say. "Who takes me as I am and doesn't need me to be more okay than I am, or less damaged than I am. You make it easier to be actually here. And I don't know what to do with that either, but I'm done pretending I don't know what it is."

He's very still.

"I don't know what this looks like," you say. "Practically. Given,"

"The floor."

"The floor."

"You're charge nurse," he says. "I'm the attending lead. There's no direct supervisory,"

"I know."

"It would require—"

"I know."

A pause.

"I'm not impulsive," he says. "I need you to know that. I don't do things halfway. If this is something, it's something. I can't do the version where it's ambiguous. I'm not built for that anymore."

"Okay," you say.

"Okay?"

"I don't want ambiguous either." You look at him. "I moved to Pittsburgh because I needed to stop being a recording of myself and start being actually present. And whatever this is," you gesture slightly, the small inadequate gesture for the thing you've been building for five months in a language of heat packs and coffee and two AM honesty, "it's the most present I've felt in two years. I'm not interested in backing away from that."

The floor continues around you. Someone calls for a consult at the other end of the hall. A monitor beeps its reassuring rhythm.

Jack Abbot looks at you with the expression that has no performance in it.

"There's a restaurant," he says. "On the North Side. It's good. I've been meaning to," he stops. Tries again. "Would you have dinner with me."

"Not a shift," you say.

"Not a shift."

"When."

"Saturday. You're off Saturday."

"How do you know my-"

"I know the schedule."

You look at him. He looks back. The door, which has been ajar for five months, is open.

"Yes," you say.

He nods. The expression does the thing, the almost-laugh, warmer than you've ever heard it, and then, briefly, the real one. Quiet and genuine and entirely devastating.

"Back to the floor," he says.

"Back to the floor," you agree.

You go in opposite directions. You don't smile until you're around the corner.

Saturday is April in Pittsburgh, which means cool and bright, the city wearing its best version of itself. The restaurant is on the North Side, small and warm, with the kind of menu that takes itself seriously without making you feel like you've walked into a performance.

He's there when you arrive. He's early, you realize. Of course he's early. He's been running tight logistics his entire adult life.

He stands when he sees you, and the simplicity of the gesture does something unexpected to your chest.

"Hi," you say.

"Hi," he says.

You sit down. The server comes. You order wine. He orders water and then looks at the wine and changes his order, and you file this as the first new thing you're learning about him outside of the hospital context. There will be many more of these. The prospect of them is something you haven't felt in a while.

The dinner is easy. Which is not what you expected, exactly. You'd anticipated a version of the careful managed conversation of the floor, the professional language, the deliberate navigation.

But off the floor he is still Jack, still precise, still honest, still the person who answers real questions with real answers, but something has been set down. Some part of the management. He talks about his sister who calls him too often and who he would not trade for anything. He talks about what it was like to go to medical school in his mid-thirties, post-military, post-amputation, in a class full of people a decade younger, and what he learned from that and what it cost. He asks about your paramedic years with the genuine curiosity of someone who wants to understand the timeline of a person, not just the resume.

You tell him about the car accident that started your paramedic career. The one you were first on scene for at twenty-two, the one where you didn't know what you were doing and did it anyway and everyone survived and you sat in the ambulance bay afterward for forty minutes understanding that this was what you were supposed to do. He listens to the whole thing.

"That's how you know," he says, when you finish. "When you can't explain the why and you don't need to."

"Is that how it was for you? Medicine?"

"After the leg," he says. "I needed something to fix things with. I'd been breaking things, one way and another, for long enough. I wanted to be on the other side of it."

"And?"

He looks at his glass. "And it worked. Mostly."

"Mostly?"

He looks at you. "There are still nights."

"I know," you say. "I've seen some of them."

"You have," he agrees. "You see things very clearly. I found it uncomfortable at first."

"And now?"

The expression. The real one. "Now I find it," he considers the word carefully, "restful."

You look at him across the table in the warm light of this restaurant on a Saturday in April and you think about five months of a specific language built of small gestures in a hospital at two in the morning, and how the thing you came to Pittsburgh to find, the presence, the being actually here, has arrived from a direction you weren't expecting.

"Can I tell you something," you say.

"Yes."

"I came here to stop being a recording of myself and I'm not sure when exactly it stopped being a risk, but I think it was early. Earlier than I wanted to admit."

He waits.

"I think it was around the time I started leaving pens near your chart station," you say.

The almost-laugh. The real one. Warm and quiet and brief, and you're close enough now, across a restaurant table on a Saturday night, that it's not at a professional distance anymore.

"Around the same time," he says.

"The heat pack?" you say.

"Before that, actually."

"When?"

"Third shift," he says. "You were in bay seven with a patient who was frightened and escalating and you were completely still. Not frozen. Still. Like someone who has been in frightening rooms before and knows that the stillness is what the other person needs, and who can provide it without it costing them anything in the moment. I'd seen nurses do that before. Not like that."

You don't say anything for a moment.

"And then I walked away and told myself it was a professional observation," he says, dry, "and I was extremely convincing. To myself. For about two weeks."

"Then what?"

"Then you left a heat pack on the counter without making it an event," he says. "And that was harder to file away."

You look at him.

He looks at you.

"Jack," you say.

"Yeah."

"I'm not very good at this part. The saying the thing part. I spent a lot of years being good at everything else."

"I know," he says. "I'm not either. I've been told I communicate like a situation report."

"You don't, actually."

"Only with you," he says. Simply. "Only recently."

The restaurant is warm and the wine is good and Pittsburgh is outside the window doing its April thing, and you reach across the table and put your hand over his.

He turns his hand over.

His thumb moves across your palm, once, and you feel it in your sternum.

"We're figuring it out," you say.

"We're figuring it out," he agrees.

Here is what you know, by the time the summer comes.

The diner on Penn Avenue knows your order. The server, whose name is Gloria, asks after Jack on the mornings you come in alone, because you came in together twice and once is a coincidence and twice is a data point and Gloria has been reading data points for thirty years.

The floor is still the floor. The work doesn't change, the long nights don't change, the particular weight of the hard ones doesn't change. But there is a shift in the architecture of the hard ones. The knowing that at the end of them there is a person who will not require you to perform recovery, who will simply be there while the shift processes through you like weather.

You go back to your hometown in June and this time you don't feel the pull of the departure the way you did in May. You feel it on the return, the Pittsburgh-shaped gravity that has been building since January, that you understand now is not the city itself but what you've put in it.

You call your mother from the airport and she asks how things are going, really, in the tone of a woman who reads her children accurately from two states away.

"Good," you say. "Really."

A pause. "There's someone," she says. Not a question.

"There's someone," you confirm.

You can hear her smiling. "Does he deserve you?"

You think about a man who answers honest questions with honest answers. Who said restful and meant it as the highest thing.

"I think we deserve each other," you say. "Which is different."

"That's better," she says. "That's the right answer."

Jack is on a Saturday morning in July, in your apartment, drinking coffee that is actually hot because you got a machine that does it correctly, reading something, when you come in from your run.

You are, in the clinical vocabulary, a lot. Red-faced, sweaty, approximately nine miles of July heat in your joints.

He looks up. He looks at you. The expression, the open one, the unguarded one, the one that stopped being rare sometime around April, sits on his face with the ease of something that lives there now.

"There's water," he says.

"I see it."

"You look like you ran somewhere unreasonable."

"Nine miles."

He shakes his head. Returns to his book. "Statistically inadvisable."

You get the water. You sit on the other end of the couch, legs folded under you, drink half of it and look at him.

"Jack."

"Hmm."

"I rescheduled the fitting appointment."

He looks up from the book.

"The socket's been giving me problems," he says.

"I know."

"I cancelled twice."

"I know that too."

A pause. He looks at you. The expression is the one that means he's deciding how much to say.

"Thank you," he says. Quietly. "For staying on it."

"You stayed on mine," you say. "The processing thing. The being-present thing. You stayed on it without making it a project."

"That's different."

"It's not."

He holds your gaze for a moment. Then the almost-sound, warm and real.

"Annoying," he says.

"You keep saying that."

"It keeps being true."

You lean over and take the book out of his hands and put it on the coffee table, and he watches you do this with the mild expression of someone who is not going to object.

"We have four hours before you have to be at the hospital," you say.

"I'm aware of the schedule."

"Then stop reading and pay attention to me."

The actual laugh, brief and quiet and entirely devastating, the same as the first time you heard it and every time since.

"You're the most presumptuous person I've ever met," he says, and puts his arm around you when you lean into his side, and outside the window Pittsburgh is doing its summer thing, green and warm, the rivers catching the light.

You're learning that this is what it's supposed to feel like.

You're learning it's worth the cost of getting here.

Author's Note:

jack abbot has been living in my head rent free for longer than i'd like to admit, and at some point i had to do something about it. so here we are.

this one is slow and quiet and a little bit about learning to let people see you. if that's your thing, i hope you like it.

for everyone who's been fine. you know the kind.

Wayne had already left for work. Eddie knew that from the tread from boots in the carpet; the unmistakable smell of cheap coffee from the kitchen and the fact that his keys weren't on the hook. All these things that were out of place were also comforting. It meant that the world was still going on, the same morning routine, the same things out of place. It also meant that this beautiful girl next to him was real. You were real, alive and breathing - all while being madly in love with him.

Eddie had tried his best not to wake you - really, he had. While he could usually be a clutz, your relationship was one of his top three things he didn't want to break; the other two being his guitar and his van. So waking you up out of the pits of your slumber and disturbing your dream world? OK, a bit of a dramatic description, but that was Eddie, overdramatic and always with a theatrical flourish. Either way, he wouldn't dream of waking you. Instead, he just led there, playing with your hair because he needed to be doing something. Under his breath, he sang whatever song or verse that came to his mind at the time. Iron Man turned into Black Dog which then turned into Ramble On which somehow turned into Aces High. Not even Eddie knew how they all linked: sometimes his brain just felt like people shoving quarters into a jukebox and fighting over what song was going to play.

Eventually though, you woke up. Eddie's first thought was how out of place you looked. He knew what your life was like: the large room, the fancy bed, the full kitchen. Then compare it to Eddie's? The makeshift bed, the stale cereal and the fact he had to sleep in the living room? Felt like two different worlds. Yet here you were, staying with Eddie. It had taken some convincing on Eddie's part to get Wayne on board. He didn't exactly want Eddie making a habit of bringing girls to sleep over, however when Wayne heard Eddie talk about you, he had a feeling that Eddie was serious about you.

"Ah, my sleeping beauty is finally awake," Eddie murmured affectionately. The usual dramatic flair was toned down and it felt like a show only you were meant to see. This softer, less brash version of Eddie. You playfully swat him though, not even bothering to hide your smile. "Can a girl not sleep now?" you ask sarcastically as, at this point, sarcasm might as well be your love language. "When a fine lady likes you deprives her boyfriend of her presence, I do believe that I earn the right to complain." And there it was, Eddie's dramatics. Back early in the morning light as if it were never gone. As stupid as it was, it did cause your heart to stutter a little bit. You'd always had a weak spot for Eddie's dramatics. "Well then, I'm pretty sure this fine lady knows how to make up for that," you murmer softly, hooking a leg over his. It was Eddie's turn for his heart to stutter a little and his breath to hitch.

Every little movement you made was sultry, like you knew what you were doing and how to get the perfect reaction from him. Fingers tracing his tattoos, gentle breath against his neck, and barely there kisses. Eddie was already growing weak in the knees. At this point, you were practically straddling Eddie and as he looked up at you, he was convinced he'd failed death saving throws and went to heaven. Your smirk, the way were sat on him, the way his shirt was riding up to reveal the pair of boxer shorts he'd lent you, it was all just so, perfect.

"I haven't even started yet," you smirk, leaning down towards Eddie's lips. His hands reach up to cup your breast as your hair fell around the two of you, creating a shield for your faces. Lips met softly at first, still half asleep and slightly clumsy, before it picked up in intensity. Yeah, Eddie really had died and gone to heaven.

All of this was rather abruptly interrupted by the sound of the trailer door opening. The sound of a potential home invasion was a total boner killer. So as much as Eddie would've loved to keep making out, the threat of the trailer being broken into was, reluctantly, more important. Footsteps creaked, not that it was an achievement though. In a cheap place like this, any movement could be heard. Eddie couldn't do much - not with you sat on top of him. Any plan of him playing hero went out the window, along with his chances of taking those kisses any further. The two of you remained frozen still. The footsteps were measured, as if the unknown visitor was carefully looking for something. If they wanted something of value, they were out of luck. The most valuable thing in this trailer was the drugs that Eddie would sell. Even then, it was only worth good money if you knew who to sell to.

"Eddie? You here?" a familiar voice called out. The two of you let out a sigh of relief as you both recognised the voice. "Henderson?" you asked Eddie, even though you were certain that it was Dustin who'd interrupted. "Henderson," Eddie confirmed with a nod of his head. At this point, Dustin might as well be your child. Somehow, the two of you had ended up adopting him, fostering his love for science, dungeons and dragons and fantasy. Although, most would use the word corrupt instead of fostering his love. "We're in the living room, Henderson," Eddie called out.

Due to the trailers small size, it didn't take long for Dustin to walk in on the two of you. That also meant that there wasn't any time to climb off of Eddie; Dustin had walked in on a scene that looked very reminiscent of the magazines that were stuffed under Eddie's mattress. Not that Dustin even noticed to begin with - he was too busy on his walkie talkie, arguing with Mike about something Eddie really didn't bother to catch. "We still on for that extra session today?" Dustin asked, stuffing his walkie talkie in his bag. "Uh… Yeah," Eddie nodded, racking his brain to try and remember when he'd agreed to that. Probably before he knew you were staying the night. "Just, give me a chance to get ready." With a smirk on your face, you kissed Eddie's neck and rolled off him, letting Eddie get up to throw some clothes on and set up his dungeons and dragons game.

Laying alone now on the mattress, you watched as Eddie trudge off to find clothes and as Dustin started setting his things up. You smiled to yourself. It really felt like Eddie had adopted the Hellfire kids but especially Dustin. So, as Eddie's girlfriend, it was almost like you felt a maternal urge over the kids too. They weren't just Eddie's kids, they were yours now too. "You eaten this morning, Henderson?" you asked, looking over at Dustin again. He hummed and mumbled something under his breath that sounded like a yeah but you knew better. DND consumed their brains - food would definitely be a last priority.